Re: Within the Asteroid II
In reply to Angus McStubbin (msg # 256):
The ex-Scout, Hanno, spoke as he worked.
"The ship that stranded us here, the Inquisitor, it's likely to be back bringing God knows who. I guess the hope was we could somehow get to it and take it back when it returns. But that's a distant hope. Really, they shot both cutters down before when things were confused, they can do it again, and it'll probably be easier. Maybe we shouldn't make repairing them a priority. At least until we discover some kind of ship bay with repair facilities. Right now we are mating the surviving engine module from one and the surviving command and service module from another, using hand tools. It can be done but it's unsafe and will take time.
"Angus, you're probably wondering who and why anyone would strand us here. Billy and Jedec, you're probably wondering as well.
"We think the guy that stranded us here is a big-time smuggler and stolen artifact dealer named Enari Kalamanaru."
He explained that Kalamanaru ran a crime syndicate in the neighboring Jungleblut subsector. He was a successful industrialist and shipping magnate and was legitimately successful. But also ran a profitable side business in stolen and smuggled art and artifacts. And he had become obsessed with the Sky Raiders. (Angus had heard about this long-vanished human minor race that had run rampant through Far Frontiers sector thousands of years ago.) First, Kalamanaru had tried and failed to rob a Sky Raider tomb on Mirayn/Jungleblut that Lorrain's father, Dr. Jothan Messandi, had located. Linus, Blake and Ken had tangled with his main henchmen, Bren Pylory and Taren Gildinkur.
Jedec and Billy realised with a start they recognised a man matching Bren's description (tall, close-cropped black hair, facial scar, carried an LAG) had been on the Inquisitor before it mutinied. And that maybe Taren (slender, carried a Zhodani-made ACR) had been there as well, after the takeover (possibly smuggled onboard).
Hanno continued. Lorrain, following her late fathers's evidence, found the tomb on Mirayn first under the auspices of the Institute for Interstellar studies in the League of Suns. Images of the items found inside had been disseminated throughout Jungleblut. Not just the Imperial-friendly League of Suns, but the Zhodani-allied Descarothe Hegemony. A piece of Sky Raider jewelry had been located on a "Free Suns" world, and pointed towards a possible Sky Raider site on Qarant, a world on the border between the Free Suns and the Hegemony and over whom both exercised joint control by treaty.
The Institute of Interstellar Studies in the Free Suns had paid for an expedition to Qarant in the hopes of locating what could possibly be a Sky Raider world. Maybe their home world, as they had seemingly founded no colonies. Again, Kalamanaru followed them, along with his henchmen Pylory and Gildinkur. But they also brought a large force of mercenaries, backed by regular forces of the Hegemony, where Kalamaru did a lot of business and wielded tremendous influence. The Sky Raiders site on Qarant had turned out to be a failed colony and not the Sky Raiders homeworld. The members of the expedition (Blake, Ken, Linus and others, plus Lorain Messandi) entered a gargantuan synthconcrete structure that seemed to be a temple to the Sky Raiders. Further exploration of its depths revealed it had actually once been a planetary defence installation on the outskirts of the colony. Kalamanaru's men followed them into the depths of the temple, then through the web of tunnels beneath it. Following scanner data and other hints they finally made their way to the bottom of a deep pit, actually the base of what had once been a silo. In the bottom of the silo wasn't a surface-to-air/orbit missile but a spacecraft, a 400-ton planetary raiding craft. Once it would have been ready to launch from its hardened and camouflaged silo, now it was converted into a ceremonial tomb. Inside the spacecraft were more skeletonised Sky Raiders, and a salvageable data bank. The remnants of the expedition escaped by climbing the silo up to the surface, and exiting the bunker located there.
Analysis of the data bank revealed three facts: the Sky Raiders were originally an obcure minor human race originating far to trailing in Gushmege Sector, the Loeskalth. The Loeskalth were extremely warlike and after losing a war with the early Vilani Imperium, chose complete annihilation over surrender and assimilation by them. Or so it was thought. Second, this failed colony was founded by dissidents after a devastating civil war among the Sky Raiders. Third, and most mind-boggling, was how the Sky Raiders traveled from Gushmege Sector through Rift, the Spinward Marches and Foreven to arrive in Far Frontiers Sector in a massive asteroid-starship, and how along the way the Loeskalth's already warlike culture was transformed into an almost completely nomadic one. They had not stopped or tarried until they reached Far Frontiers. But once there they settled into a pattern of raiding and pillaging the many helpless worlds there that were already settled by a minor human race, the Vlazdhumecta. The Vlazdhumecta had settled much of Far Frontiers using Zhodani-derived Jump drives before being partially annexed by the Zhodani Consulate, the rest of their worlds falling into pre-spaceflight barbarism making them easy prey for the Sky Raiders who arrived a century later. The Sky Raiders pillaged Far Frontiers for centuries, using their asteroid as a mother ship. Then there was a decades-long civil war that saw many thousands of Sky Raiders leaving a mother ship that was almost completely wrecked, and the rest of the population trapped as it drifted helplessly through the void on a ballistic course heading coreward.
It was by analysing this course the Institute calculated where the mother ship would be, and send an expedition on the Inquisitor, a ship leased from the neutral Mnemnosyne Principality, which was close to the mothership's suspected position. There was a mutiny, or takeover, or something on the Inquisitor, which saw the expedition on the mothership marooned. Then the Inquisitor jumped out. And here they were.